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These are the reissues, compilation, mixes and all-important "etc" that we have been getting most pleasure from this year. This chart was compiled by John Doran out of polls from Patrick Clarke, Christian Eede, Luke Turner, Anna Wood & himself based on their favourites of the year since January 1.
When I got up at 5am this morning, on the day of publication, to write the introduction to this chart my mental notes were essentially this:
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury! Necessary brevity. Buy records from Norman. Good guys. Money for us? That would be jolly nice (and life-saving) but don’t leave yourself short. This chart + albums chart + tracks chart (later in the week) + genre column top tens = essential sonic nirvana + full audio picture of the Quietus. Also: buy good ear plugs! Never buy anything you see advertised on public transport! Don’t step off a moving bus! Happy Christmas. And for the love of God, start wearing a cycle helmet…
And I think that pretty much sums it up.
The only thing I think bears expanding upon here is this, please do buy an album or two from Norman if you like what you read about. Well over 90% of this chart is either made by marginal, independent (if not struggling) musicians or put out by marginal labels that make little in the way of profit – or both. And if you like this feature or the site in general, please do think about bunging us a few quid via the donate button, especially if you use an ad-blocker. 100% of this money goes to covering our essential running costs – with absolutely none of it lining my echoing and flea-bitten pockets. But don’t leave yourself short if you’re out of work, a student, on incapacity benefit, in a low income household, an OAP or even if you’re having to choose between donating and buying some no frills mince pies.
This top 100 isn’t supposed to be some kind of spurious scientifically objective statement on quality rather just a reflection on what editorial staff at tQHQ – Patrick Clarke, Christian Eede, Luke Turner, Anna Wood and me, John Doran – have been listening to in 2017. The net is quite wide, featuring as it does reissues, compilations, DJ mixes, live albums, soundtracks, split LPs, anthologies, best ofs and the like.
Happy Christmas… and for God’s sake, start wearing a bike helmet!
On Objekt’s contribution to the Dekmantel podcast series, he demonstrates in full the technical prowess he’s been mastering for some years as well as his propensity for shifting beyond the house and techno that those less clued-up to his current club sets might expect. While that indeed remains the focus of much of the mix’s first half (including an outing for the outrageously catchy, singalong melody of his own ‘Theme From Q’), the DJ stretches out a little beyond that after, cutting the tempo drastically, though in such a way that you’d barely notice. Christian Eede
KAOS is one of the finest nightclubs in London and beyond, and not just for an open-minded, inclusive deviance, queer defiance, and the sort of vibe that most assume you have to go to Germany to find. They’re also terrific at not merely relying on big names to fill a big room with lumbering gurners, willing to give new names a try at peak time. Former tQ reviews editor Sophie Coletta is among that number and this mix, recorded from KAOS in July, is a 90s minute tour de force through disco dragooned to an EBM and techno rhythm. Leather up, get flushed. Luke Turner
18.Various Artists –
Sounds of Sisso
(Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Appearing initially in a limited run of 200 cassettes and now set for a wider vinyl release, the first from Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes, Sounds of Sisso is a frenetic trip through the singeli sound emerging from Tanzania’s capital city Dar Es Salaam. The sound is coloured by high-speed beats, pitch-shifted vocal samples and the bars of various MCs, offering plenty to enjoy for fans of Shangaan electro. Christian Eede
17.Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds –
Lovely Creatures
(Mute BMG)
The consistent brilliance of his discography – only Nocturama borders on the average – has been noted by many, but as he continues to produce such diverse, forward-thinking records as Skeleton Tree and Push The Sky Away so deep into his career, perhaps it’s time for the name Nick Cave to be uttered in the same breath as Messrs Cohen, Bowie et al. Patrick Clarke
16.Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth For Christ Choir –
Like A Ship… (Without A Sail)
(Numero)
The Youth For Christ Choir is certainly not the most traditionally beautiful gospel choir on record. You won’t find the slick polish of Kirk Franklin’s groups, or even the tightness of the Edwin Hawkins Singers. There is a rough, almost dissonant quality to the YCC’s singing (see ‘Nobody Knows’) that lends the songs desperation and urgency. Daniel Hornsby
Time Machines is an album of four deeply mood-altering soundscapes, originally released as a self-titled CD under the name Time Machines in 1998. Each piece on the record is suffused, as are all Coil releases, with psychotropic and esoteric significance, referencing occult tradition and imagery, and Time Machines has become a touchstone of late twentieth century drone music, one whose influence persists today. Richard Fontenoy
Of the three Pharoah Sanders albums re-released by Mexican Summer this year – Tauhid, Summun Bukmun Umyun and Jewels Of Thought – it’s the latter, even among such an esteemed trio, that truly sticks out. Across just two compositions Sanders veers from grand spiritual poise to almighty cataclysm without a seam. At times more serene and transcendent that Kamasi Washington, at others more bombastic in its squalls than Sly & The Dead Neanderthals, and recorded many decades before either, if there was anything more required to prove Sanders’ status as one of the true masters of jazz, this is it. Patrick Clarke
12.JD Twitch (Optimo) –
1987 Reimagined (30 Year Anniversary Mix)
(mix)
Here are 30 tracks mixed together that were the sound of my late teenage years that I tried to turn people on to 30 years ago. Most of the records in this mix would lie dormant on my shelves for the next 20 years but in the last 10 years or so a surprising number have found their way back into my sets and finally found an appreciative audience and sound as good, if not better today than they did 30 years ago. JD Twitch
Something that sets Another Green World apart from other albums of its time, and indeed the 40 years following it, is its reckless zigzagging of mood, feel and genre. When the sessions finally kicked into gear, it appears that Eno felt unashamed to follow his creative muse wherever it might take him and he ended up with a mesh of influences that surround the album, from art pop, minimalism, jazz, folk to German kosmische musik and many other strands between, all adding to his tapestry of inspiration. William Doyle
Apparently put together from Kirby’s prodigious archive of tracks, lurking in his Krakow HQ, it’s like an assemblage of all the best moments of album interlude music you’ve ever heard drunk, wept over, grieving and bleakly euphoric, like rolling over onto the other side of a bed still warm from a lover just departed for good. Luke Turner
The album is a paradise of soft edges and sun, comforting like a new towel or freshly-made bed. But into this paradise no darkness can enter, there’s no shade to its light or vile sea creatures lurking in its aquatic utopia. Ben Cardew
In 2014 the British Council helped facilitate a meeting between key players from the UK bass/grime scene and Egyptian’s emerging mahragan movement (we’ve finally been persuaded to stop calling it electro chaabi!) which included exchange visits and a Boiler Room collaboration. This cross-pollination of scenes was celebrated in a recent documentary called Cairo Calling but (perhaps slightly confusingly) it is now also the name of a great compilation album put out by Rinse and 100Copies Cairo celebrating the best new dance music from the Egyptian city, featuring, as it does, old favourites such as Islam Chipsy and Amr HaHa and newcomers DJ Ismail and El Gezawee. John Doran
7.Various Artists –
Lessons
(Front & Follow)
As with the preceding 49 releases from F&F, there’s hardly a dull moment or an iota of filler on Lessons. It’s like being given the best kind of mixtape, one that prompts further discovery while retaining that sense of wonder. While the album admirably exhibits Front & Follow’s eclecticism, it does so with a seemingly effortless simplicity that relies neither on juxtapositions made for their own sake nor diverging too wildly from an overall worldview. Richard Fontenoy
Somehow our creations, influenced by Kraftwerk, Eno, Bryars and the entire ethnographic collection of Leeds City Library (an impressive selection) seemed to achieve a kind of autonomy, as if someone else had invented it or it had always been. This kind of re-purposing and juxtaposition that you hear in the Moomins putting ocarinas and Casios together really came out of the same left-field that has its roots in art movements from the 20s to the 50s in Europe and the US. You don’t really realize how that legacy is affecting you at the time. Graeme Miller
Call Super’s Fabric 92 carries a distinct sense of freedom, flowing so smoothly that, at times, you might be unsure of whether there are two or three tracks in a mix, or when one track finishes and another starts – no mean feat for a mix that traverses overwhelming techno from Objekt, blissed-out trips from Carl Craig and a 1970s blues acapella piece recorded by Walter Brown, with beatless and electro tangents somewhere in between. Christian Eede
The acronymic word ‘neet’, derived from ‘not in employment, education or training’, is not in itself pejorative, but rarely used in a positive context. Glasgow label Akashic are bucking that rule with N.E.E.T, a compilation of (mostly) covers recorded in the city’s Green Door Studios over the last eight years, as part of a course aimed at local youth who fit the neet description. A follow-up of sorts to the Musikal Yooth LP from 2010, this is a worthy exercise, honourable even, but I wouldn’t be writing about it here if it wasn’t great as well. Noel Gardner
“People kept asking me about this, that and the other, and there was a lot of misinformation going around at the time. I didn’t and don’t want the art world to think that I’m just kept in this tiny little gallery and my work is just that; it’s not, it’s music and it’s public. This had a a life of its own, it went outside of the music business, outside the art world, into women’s magazines. I think Time To Tell represents everything before, and a cut off point for that kind of action. I came to realise that people expected me to be naked. So obviously I kept my clothes on, and disappointed them. Tough!” Cosey Fanni Tutti
Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat of Cameroon 1976 – 1984
(Analog Africa)
In the mid-1970s funk and disco collided with the bass-heavy Cameroonian music incorporating the merengue, high life and rhumba, causing the makossa sensation across the dancefloors of that country that would last for nearly a decade. From a blazing one hit wonder from Bill Loko to an undeniable Afro anthem by Pasteur Lappe, this Analog Africa compilation is 100% killer. John Doran
The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
(Luaka Bop)
I can’t help feeling that right now there may be Californian musical outfits listening to this remarkable record and trying to craft their own replication of it. All I will say is, just, please don’t. I am no believer, yet when I hear these sounds, and when Alice Coltrane stamps down hard on her Oberheim pedals at ‘Keshava Murahara”s end, I can feel openings in our perceived reality begin to reveal themselves and usher us forward into divine infinity. You have never heard anything quite like this. In the words of recording engineer Baker Bigsby, “…it sounds like a spaceship landing in heaven”. Euan Andrews
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